Czech and Other Experimental Films Now and Then
Yesterday’s experiments have often turned into today’s canons. Avant-garde cinema of the 1920s and 1930s is
a case in point. What was once an exciting discovery became part of everyday
visual language. And yet watching some
historical experimental films, one can somehow feel their originality and
freshness even today. Will today’s experiments also turn canonical?

To ponder this question it is
intriguing to see today’s experimental films next to historical films of the
same or similar genres. For this
purpose, the program of three film evenings comprises several experimental
shorts in three different genres: abstract films, big city life films and
narrative films. The program presents historical pictures by Czech filmmakers
Alexander Hackenschmied, Otakar Vávra, František Pilát, Svatopluka
Innemanna, Karel and Irena Dodals, while contemporary examples include
shorts by Americans Amos Poe, Michael
Joaquin Grey, Bill Morrison, British Isaac Julien, and two young Czechs Kryštof
Pešek and Hana Železná.

The key Modernist concept of abstraction
had a major impact on avant-garde filmmakers in Europe.
As the films The Light Penetrates the Darkness
by Vávra and Pilát and The Idea Seeking Light
by Karel and Irena Dodals demonstrate, abstraction was often associated with
technology and progress or with spiritual issues. This heritage can still be
detected in the work of contemporary authors, though these interests have branched
out into various directions. Here the issue of materiality of the film medium
and its dramatic transformation through digital technology represents a major subject
and concern.

Big city life was another key
theme that attracted avant-garde artists and filmmakers.

Aimless
Walk by Alexander Hackenschmied reconnects this genre to its origins by
invoking the trope of flaneur. Hackenschmied’s Prague Castleprovides a striking complement to Amos
Poe’s Empire II, an impressive
variation on Andy Warhol’s classic.The
dominant architectural icons of Prague and New York emerge here as historical
symbols of the European and the American city.

In narrative films, avant-garde
filmmakers have come closest to the mainstream commercial cinema. Characteristically,
erotic desire and fantasy occupy a major theme in this genre. Hence a
juxtaposition of historical and contemporary examples reveals telling insights
into changing mores and conventions of contemporary society.~Jaroslav Andel

Michael Joaquin Grey, an artist whose work has bridged the boundaries
between art, science, media,
and the imagination for the last twenty years. His interdisciplinary practice
revolves around the development and origins of life and language, as well as morphology. The self organizing
principles of living and nonliving things,
from muscle cells up to cultural phenomena,
are among the diverse concerns that Grey's work examines. Featuring wall vinyl, computational videos,
sculptures, and prints, the exhibition investigates critical moments in
natural phenomena and culture with a nearly scientific eye, all the while testing the very limits and
boundaries of the tools required in such study.

“The Attendant” (1993) is actually set in a museum:
Wilberforce House in Hull, England, which is devoted to the history of slavery. It’s a
real place, though in Mr. Julien’s
hands it looks surreal.

The plot revolves around sexual fantasies aroused
in a middle-aged black male museum guard — or attendant — by a young white male
visitor. Much of the action takes place after closing time. As the guard paces
the galleries, a huge 19th-century
painting titled “Slaves on the West Coast of Africa”,
by the French artist François-Auguste Biard,
comes to life, its melodramatic
scene of a white master bending over a dying black slave transformed into an
up-to-date, leather clad
sadomasochistic grouping.

Next,
there’s an erotic scene between a guard and a young man in a gallery hung with
soft-core drawings by Tom of Finland,
one of many references to the contemporary art in the film. Their cries are
overheard by a third character, a
black woman called the conservator,
who approvingly listens through the wall as she cleans the museum’s picture
frames.

The film is only 10 minutes long, but it packs in a rich variety of images and moods.
They include some funky camp humour (gold-lamé bar-boy; mosquito-size Cupids), a complex sexual and racial dynamic of dominance
and submission and a poignant sense of loss,
which serves as a reminder that the piece was made at the height of the AIDS
epidemic.Holland Cotter, The New
York Times

Jaroslav Andel:Ph.D. Jaroslav Anděl received his Ph.D. in Art History from Charles University
and his M.F.A. in Photography from the Film and Television Faculty of the
Academy of the Performing Arts in Prague.
As a visual artist in the1970s he had several one-person exhibitions and
participated in group exhibitions of photo-based and conceptual art in Europe, Asia and the United States. In 1982 he moved
from Prague to New York City, and has since has produced numerous exhibitions
and publications on modern and contemporary art both in the Czech Republic
and abroad. He is the co-author of Czech Modernism 1900-1945 (Museum of
Fine Arts Houston, Houston, Texas,
U.S.A. 1990) and co-editor of Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film
Theory and Criticism, 1908-1939
(Czech National Film Archive: 2008). He is the artistic director of the DOX Center
for Contemporary Art in Prague. www.dox.cz